About four new communication towers will spring up in Cook County the next several years, but if another forest fire threatened to ravage the the towers would help all the emergency personnel manage the crisis. Sheriff Mark Falk attended the February 8 county board meeting with Rey Freeman of GeoComm, the technical consulting firm helping Cook County gear up for the state’s new Allied Radio Matrix for Emergency Response (ARMER) program that will enable government agencies to communicate with one another using a common radio system.
All of the new towers will be under 200 feet, which will require more towers with smaller coverage areas than taller towers. The State of Minnesota is funding the system’s backbone, but local funding will be needed to get everything up to speed. Sheriff Falk believes that grants may be available to help purchase the new equipment needed to use the system.
Cook County’s communication system was “entirely overloaded” during the Ham Lake fire, Freeman said, with many public agencies from outside the county converging to give aid as well. Agencies had difficulty working together because they were using different radio communication systems. The new system will have much greater communication capacity than the systems that have been in use up to this point.
If all existing public safety and public works VHF radios are replaced with 800 MHz radios, Cook County might end up with as many as 506 individual radio units costing an estimated $1,353,600. Agencies that could make use of the new technology include the Sheriff ’s Office, fire departments, the ambulance service, First Responders, North Shore Hospital, the Cook County Highway Department, the Grand Marais Public Utilities Commission, and the Cook County Public Health & Human Services Department.
The federal government is requiring public agencies to go to a narrow bandwidth of 800 MHz by 2013. It plans to require even narrower bandwidths at an undetermined time in the future.
Cook County cannot expect fire districts, townships, and unorganized territories to bear the entire burden of upgrading to the ARMER system, Sheriff Falk told the county board. His department will be working on finding funding sources to help the smaller entities.
The state’s new ARMER
radio communications
system will allow
governmental agencies
to communicate with
each other via a common
radio system. Thirteen
towers are planned for
Cook County, some
which already exist,
although this will
still leave some areas
uncovered, especially
the Boundary Waters
Canoe Area Wilderness
(BWCAW). The towers are
planned for the following
locations:
. Bogus Lake
. Cascade Lake
. Devil Fish
. Gunflint
. Honeymoon
. Hovland
. Lima Mountain
. Lutsen
. Maple Hill
. Mid-Gunflint Trail
. Mount Maud
. Pine Mountain
. Sawbill Trail North
In addition, a tower that
will cover part of the
Schroeder area is planned
for Lake County.
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